The expansion of married women’s property rights was a main achievement of the first wave of feminism in Latin America. As Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon reveal, however, the disjuncture between rights and actual ownership remains vast. This is particularly true in rural areas, where the distribution of land between men and women is highly unequal. In their pioneering, twelve-country comparative study, the authors argue that property ownership is directly related to women’s bargaining power within the household and community, point out changes resulting from recent gender-progressive legislation, and identify additional areas for future reform, including inheritance rights of wives. (Summary from JSTOR)

This collection of articles examines the impact of armed conflict on women, men, and gender relations. Gender stereotypes of conflict depict women and children as powerless victims, while men are presented either as saviours of the weak and powerless, or as agents of violence and destruction. Reality is more complex. Women, girls, and boys also wage war as soldiers, often against their will. Atrocities committed against them give rise to desperate physical, mental, and material need, which reconstruction and peace initiatives must recognise and address. In addition, women need to be involved as decision makers in peace and reconstruction processes. These must founded on a vision of equality in governance and everyday social interactions, if a sustainable peace is to come about. Case studies included here come from India, Kosovo, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.

Cupples, Julie. 2005. “Love and Money in an Age of Neoliberalism: Gender, Work, and Single Motherhood in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 37 (2): 305–22.

Author: Julie Cupples

Abstract:

Based on qualitative research conducted in 1999 and 2001 with a group of single mothers in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, this paper examines the contradictory impacts of neoliberalism on work, based on the understanding that economic restructuring can generate both crisis and a space for changes in gender identities. By focusing on the broader picture of women's work and on the intersections between paid and unpaid work, it discusses what happens to these intersections in times of intense political and economic change. Despite the hardships caused by neoliberalism, it appears that work is a site in which gender ideologies can be challenged. The paper has four main sections. First, it explores the ways in which certain cultural processes are intensified under neoliberalism which affects the relationship between constructions of masculinity and femininity. Second, it assesses the impact of neoliberalism on domestic work and the implications of this for GAD (gender and development) understandings of the double burden and of how the balance of women's paid and unpaid work changes under neoliberalism. Third, it examines the ways in which hegemonic understandings of femininities and motherhood and revolutionary legacies can be resistant to the neoliberal present. Finally, it discusses how work under neoliberalism can be a site of female empowerment or self-esteem.

From the perspective of a peasant family, this article explores the agrarian counter reform that took place in Honduras in the early 1990s, as a process of primitive accumulation. Specifically, it attempts to recuperate the shared experience of many peasant women through an ethnographic and gendered perspective, which sheds some lights on how dispossession, defined as a permanent and constitutive process of capitalism, operates. (English translation provided by original source)

Gender Justice, Development, and Rights reflects on the significance accorded in international development policy to rights and democracy in the post-Cold War era. Key items on the contemporary policy agenda - neo-liberal economic and social policies, democracy, and multi-culturalism - are addressed here by leading scholars and regional specialists through theoretical reflections and detailed case studies. Together they constitute a collection which casts contemporary liberalism in a distinctive light by applying a gender perspective to the analysis of political and policy processes. Case studies from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, East-Central Europe, South and South-East Asia contribute a cross-cultural dimension to the analysis of contemporary liberalism - the dominant value system in the modern world - by examining how it both exists in and is resisted in developing and post-transition societies. (Summary from WorldCat)

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction

Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi

Part I: Re-Thinking Liberal Rights And Universalism

2. Women's Capabilities And Social Justice

Martha Nussbaum

3. Gender Justice, Human Rights And Neo-Liberal Economic Policies

Diane Elson

4. Multiculturalism, Universalism And The Claims Of Democracy

Anne Phillips

Part II: Social Sector Restructuring And Social Rights

5. Political And Social Citizenship: An Examination Of The Case Of Poland

Jacqueline Heinen and Stephane Portet

6. Engendering The New Social Citizenship In Chile: Ngos And Social Provisioning Under Neo-Liberalism

A critique of how the World Bank encourages gender norms, Developing Partnerships argues that financial institutions are key players in the global enforcement of gender and family expectations. By combining analysis of documents produced and sponsored by the World Bank with interviews of World Bank staffers and case studies, Kate Bedford presents a detailed examination of gender and sexuality in the policies of the world's most influential development institution (Summary from WorldCat).

Table of Contents:

1. Working women, caring men, and the family bank : ideal gender relations after the Washington consensus

2. The model region remodels partnerships : the politics of gender research in Latin America and the Caribbean

Most treatments of economic change harbour a conceptual silence: the refusal to recognise that global restructuring is occurring on a gendered terrain. This book's unique contribution to the literature on restructuring and adjustment lies in its application of feminist scholarship to macroeconomics. The contributors focus on these conceptual silences, examining macroeconomic methods and policies in order to propose new research strategies to deliver a more gender-aware economics (Summary from WorldCat).

An exploration of how Nicaragua's least powerful citizens have fared in the years since the Sandinista revolution, as neo-liberal governments have rolled back state-supported reforms and introduced measures to promote the development of a market-driven economy (Summary from WorldCat).